SQL Quiz: Toughest Challenges

Denis Gobo — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:35:00 GMT

Chris Shaw posted a new SQL Quiz where he asks: "What are the largest challenges that you have faced in your career and how did you overcome those?"

Denny Cherry (@mrdenny on twitter)tagged me so here is my story:

The biggest problem I had was when a developer I worked with went on vacation, it was agreed upon by us and the client that once that developer came back from vacation we would make her changes 'live'. Needless to say a week after she left the cliend needed this code now because the tax code changed (or something like that) I did not really know what she worked on specifically, nor did I know if whatever the latest thing was on development should be pushed out to production. We had some code on the QA box but that was not the greatest and latest either. The biggest problem was that I didn't really know what procs had changed between dev/qa and production. I tried to do this manually but after 4 hours of so got frustated because I was scared I would mess up something on the production box.

This is where third party tools come in :-) I fired up SQL Compare and SQL Data Compare (for the lookup tables mostly) saw what needed to be changed on production, scripted out everything and I was in business. Yes I dropped tables on a production box (one table really) and messed up data but that I could fix fairly easy with a point in time restore and I knew what needed to be done. The problem is when you are faced with the unknown, what you do then will decide if you sink deeper into the hole you are already in or if you come out of that hole saving the company/CEO/data.....

So now it is my turn to tag some victims. first person I am taging is George Mastros, an amazing SQL developer and a good friend. Next up is Alexander Kuznetsov because he was giving me a hard time with the interview questions post. Another person I am tagging is Aaron Bertrand (@aaronbertrand on twitter) because I learned a lot of him from the newsgroups when I was lurking. Finally I am tagging Andy Leonard because he is on twitter (okay so I had to come up with a reason, @andyleonard)

Denis Gobo : SQL Challenges

SQL Quiz: Toughest Challenges